Research On The Robotic Spraying Process And Path Planning For Plasma Spray Tooling

Rapid tooling (RT) has become more and more important for its low manufacturing cost and ability of rapidly responding to the market. Plasma spray metal tooling has obtained a special attention for its advantages of high quality and fewer limits on the pattern's size and spraying materials. The key problem here is how to keep formability and coating quality in rapid spray tooling. In rapid spray tooling, different spray paths and different spray crafts must bring different dynamic heat exchange, and the plasma spray path determines distribution of the temperature field for spray coating. So it is necessary to plan the spray path for robot plasma spray. In this paper, it has gained the optimized spraying space between two paths by analyzing the distribution of temperature field and formability of coating got from experiments in different spraying spaces and by analyzing results of the shape of section of a spray path and theoretic ally optimized spraying space that got from the former experiments by other members of our laboratory. The author introduced the method of converting the manufacturing paths got from CAM to paths for the six axis robotic rapid spray tooling in this paper. Using the VC++ software, the author developed a path converting software, so that the robot can accurately control the path, angle and traveling speed of the plasma spray gun and the spray distance between the part and gun, achieving automation of the rapid plasma spraying, and introduced a method of feature-based path layout for plasma spraying, it's concept and sorts of feature and the software system framework. Finally, the paper issues an example of a car cover die forming process. The track was generated, simulated and translated, and the plasma spray was realized according the track adopting a Z shaped spray path and optimized spraying parameters, gained better sprayed coating and made the mould and die of the part successfully, validated the feasibility and practicability of the plasma spraying tooling.